I've been playing with simh recently, and there is a nonzero chance I will
soon be acquiring a PDP/11-70.
I realize I could run 2.11BSD on it, and as long as I stay away from a
networking stack, I probably won't see too many coremap overflow errors.
But I think I'd really rather run V7.
However, there's one thing that makes it a less than ideal environment for
me. I grew up after cursor-addressable terminals were a thing, and, even
if I can eventually make "ed" do what I want, it isn't much fun. I've been
an Emacs user since 1988 and my muscle memory isn't going to change soon
(and failing being able to find and build Gosmacs or an early GNU Emacs,
yes, I can get by in vi more easily than in ed; all those years playing
Nethack poorly were good for something).
So...where can I find a curses implementation (and really all I need in the
termcap or terminfo layer is ANSI or VTxxx) that can be coerced into
building on V7 pretty easily?
Also, I think folks here might enjoy reading a little personal travelogue
of some early Unix systems from my perspective (which is to say, a happy
user of Unix for 30+ years but hardly ever near core development (I did do
the DIAG 250 block driver for the zSeries port of OpenSolaris; then IBM
pushed a little too hard on the price and Sun sold itself to (ugh) Oracle
instead; the world would have been more fun if IBM had bought the company
like we were betting on)). That's at
https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14340.html ; that in turn references a
review I did about a year ago of The Unix Hater's Handbook, at
https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14272.html .
Adam
> From: Mary Ann Horton
> Warren's emacs would have been part of the Bell Labs 'exptools'
> (experimental tools) package ... it's possible that's what you have.
I don't think so; Warren had been a grad student in our group, and we got it
on that basis. I'm pretty sure we didn't have termcap or any of that stuff.
Noel
I'm reminded since Erik brought this up...
Is Warren Montgomery's emacs available, like, anywhere... I used it long
ago on V7m, and I had it on my AT&T 7300 (where it was available as a
binary package).
It's the first emacs I ever used. I don't recall where we got it for the
PDP-11. On our system, we had it permission-restricted so only certain
trusted users could use it - basically, people who could be trusted not to
be in it all the time, and not to use it while the system was busy. We
had an 11/40 with 128K, and 2 or 3 people trying to use Mongomery emacs
would basically crush the system...
In the absence of that, I've always found JOVE to be the next best thing,
as far as being lightweight and sufficently emacs-like. I actually
install it on almost all of my Linux systems. Did JOVE ever run on V7?
--Pat.
> From: Pat Barron
> Is Warren Montgomery's emacs available, like, anywhere...
I've got a copy on the dump of the MIT PWB system. I'm actually supposed to
resurrect it for someone, IIRC, (the MIT system was .. idiosyncratic, so it'll
take a bit of tweaking), but haven't gotten to it yet.
Does anyone else have the source, or is mine the only one left?
Noel
Sorry for the long delay on this notice, but until this weekend there were
still a few things to iron out before I made a broad announcement.
First, I want to thank the wonderful folks at the Living Computers Museum
and Labs <https://livingcomputers.org/> who are set up to host an event at
their museum for our members on the evening of July 10, which is during the
week of USENIX ATC. To quote an email from their Curator, Aaron Alcorn: "*an
easy-going members events with USENIX attendees as their special invited
guests.*" As Aaron suggested, this event will just be computer people
and computers, which seems fitting and a good match ;-)
Our desire is to have as many of the old and new 'UNIX folks' at this event
as possible and we can share stories of how our community got to where we
are. Please spread the word, since we want to get as many people coming
and sharing as we can. BTW: The Museum is hoping to have their
refurbished PDP-7 running by that date. A couple of us on this list will
be bringing a kit of SW in the hopes that we can boot Unix V0!!
Second, USENIX BOD will provide us a room at ATC all week long to set up
equipment and show off some things our community has done in the past. I
have been in contact with some of you offline and will continue to do so.
There should be some smaller historical systems that people will bring
(plus connections to the LCM's systems via the Internet, of course) and
there will be some RPi's running different emulators.
I do hope that both the event and the computer room should be fun for all.
Thanks,
Clem Cole
I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did.
So, anyone ever use this feature?
David
Several list members report having used, or suffered under, filesystem
quotas.
At the University Utah, in the College of Science, and later, the
Department of Mathematics, we have always had an opposing view:
Disk quotas are magic meaningless numbers imposed by some bozo
ignorant system administrator in order to prevent users from
getting their work done.
Thus, in my 41 years of systems management at Utah, we have not had a
SINGLE SYSTEM with user disk quotas enabled.
We have run PDP-11s with RT-11, RSX, and RSTS, PDP-10s with TOPS-20,
VAXes with VMS and BSD Unix, an Ardent Titan, a Stardent, a Cray
EL/94, and hundreds of Unix workstations from Apple, DEC, Dell, HP,
IBM, NeXT, SGI, and Sun with numerous CPU families (Alpha, Arm, MC68K,
SPARC, MIPS, NS 88000, PowerPC, x86, x86_64, and maybe others that I
forget at the moment).
For the last 15+ years, our central fileservers have run ZFS on
Solaris 10 (SPARC, then on Intel x86_64), and for the last 17 months,
on GNU/Linux CentOS 7.
Each ZFS dataset gets its space from a large shared pool of disks, and
each dataset has a quota: thus, space CAN fill up in a given dataset,
so that some users might experience a disk-full situation. In
practice, that rarely happens, because a cron job runs every 20
minutes, looking for datasets that are nearly full, and giving them a
few extra GB if needed. Affected users in a average of 10 minutes or
so will no longer see disk-full problems. If we see serious imbalance
in the sizes of previously similar-sized datasets, we manually move
directory trees between datasets to achieve a reasonable balance, and
reset the dataset quotas.
We make nightly ZFS snapshots (hourly for user home directories), and
send the nightlies to an off-campus server in a large datacenter, and
we write nightly filesystem backs to a tape robot. The tape technology
generations have evolved through 9-track, QIC, 4mm DAT, 8mm DAT, DLT,
LTO-4, LTO-6, and perhaps soon, LTO-8.
Our main fileserver talks through a live SAN FibreChannel mirror to
independent storage arrays in two different buildings.
Thus, we always have two live copies of all data, and third far-away
live copy that is no more than 24 hours old.
Yes, we do see runaway output files from time to time, and an
occasional student (among currently more than 17,000 accounts) who
uses an unreasonable amount of space. In such cases, we deal with the
job, or user, involved, and get space freed up; other users remain
largely remain unaware of the temporary space crisis.
The result of our no-quotas policy is that few of our users have ever
seen a disk-full condition; they just get on with their work, as they,
and we, expect them to do.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i used the fair share schedular whilst a sysadmin of a small cray at UNSW. being an expensive machine the various departments who paid for it wanted, well, their fair share.
in a different job i had a cron job that restricted Sybase backend engines to a subset of the cpus on an big SGI box during peak hours, at night sybase had free reign of all cpus.
anyone did anything similar?
-Steve
